Abstract
Background:
An amount of 70,000 minor/major amputees are annually performed for different reasons such as tumor, trauma, perivascular diseases or diabetic ulcera yearly in Germany. Over the course of time a lot of patients get problems with their stump, which leads to an incompatible prosthetic treatment and immobilisation.
Objective:
Handicapped patients are often characterized by a long history of pain. The fact that they often had comorbidities as diabetes, vascular diseases or other metabolic affection, leads to the situation that no other differential diagnoses are taken into account.
Patients and methods:
We present a case of a 62 year old patient with a history of burning pain with punctum maximum at the dorso-medial part of the distal femur stump 40 years after a traumatic above-knee amputation. He had sought different medical consultations and had a lot of modifications on his prosthesis shaft with partial benefit. The clinical examination confirmed the suspected diagnosis of a stump neuroma from the sciatic nerve, which has been verified in the MRI. Concerning the symptoms and the increasing immobilisation caused by the burning pain, we indicated a surgical revision which includes a resection from the neuroma and a local flap graft correction.
Results:
Postoperatively he described a complete pain relief. After 6 weeks under weight bearing mobilisation he was 100% free of pain in his new custom-made shaft prosthesis and could mobilised under full bearing.
Conclusion:
We conclude that neurinoma needs to be considered in handicapped patients with such symptomatology and has to be surgically revised, even if that decision especially for handicapped patients is often difficult for the surgeon.